Will Cotton

I think something went wrong with my original post but here it is anyway

Recently in class I have discovered the work of Will Cotton. I first came across his work in our assigned reading but on further inspection, I am more familiar with his look than previously thought. Having to work on a large scale painting in class, I chose to do very child-like pink and purple clouds. Will Cotton seems to have this same fascination in much of his work.

In general, I love the colors he uses. Because his paintings are of sweets and candies, they basically are made up of pinks, reds, yellows, purples, and very small hints of vibrant cooler colors. Everything he paints is very lush and realistic but has a hint of haziness. I attribute that to being almost like a dream or a distant memory. Though his work is mainly made up of the same color palette, they are all different when it comes to the layers of paints he uses as well as taking advantage of using paint right out of the tube.

In class, layering paints was something that I really was having trouble with. However, after researching Cotton and looking at his work, I realized that layering can be done with not only translucent colors. I had the misconception that oil painting has to almost be exclusively layers of translucent paints but Cotton perfectly displays the advantages to using opaque colors and layers.

One thing that I really appreciate is his close attention to the landscape and the world he is creating. Even in his portraiture work, the landscape is still given a great amount of attention, almost more than the human subject. His process involves getting the actual food that he is painting and starting from working with life. After he photographs the set up and finishes the paintings from those. This makes me want to experiment with painting from life, and even more so a life that I created. Cotton is literally creating a self-controlled world and taking inspiration from there. There is so much control that fascinates me and pulls me in to take that on in my own paintings.

Another aspect of his work that I appreciate is the light-heartedness. I was beginning to get the preconception that art and paintings had to be either super abstract or hyper-realistic, but Cotton’s has this delicate balance between the two that attracted me so much. Feeling a bit discouraged about the possibility of “doing something wrong” in my paintings mixed with the pure frustration that is oil painting, I found a confront in Cotton’s work. I saw that he was literally working with the same materials as me, but I could see he loved what he did through his pieces. I want to have fun. So I did. With painting these luscious clouds, yes, it caused me a lot of anxiety and frustration but I loved doing it because I loved what I was painting. I had more confidence because there was an anchor with painting clouds mixed with the freedom of the pallet I chose.